Bank Of America Tells Family It Won't Foreclose, Tries To Foreclose Anyway

For two years, a family in Washington state has been waiting for Bank of America to get its act together and finally figure out whether it’s evicting them or whether it’s going to adjust their mortgage.

And it isn’t a mere matter of backlogged paperwork that’s holding things up. Rather, it’s that no one at the bank seems to have any idea what BofA is supposed to do.

The family’s troubles, like so many others, began back in 2009. The husband lost his job and attempted to get a mortgage adjustment. And even though the person they talked to at BofA said she couldn’t legally tell them to skip payments, she made it clear that the only way they would be able to get an adjustment is if they missed payments.

And so they stopped paying the mortgage, but when they applied for a modification, they got what is now a typical story from BofA customers.

“I would send in the paperwork. They would say they never got it,” the husband tells King5 News. “I would spend hours on the phone with them; they would say I never called them.”

But while no one at BofA had a clue as to how to process the modification, the bank was making swift work of moving forward on foreclosure.

And so the day after they finally got a refusal on their mortgage mod, the bank sold their house.

By this point, the husband was back at work and able to make the payments. They talked to BofA and a few weeks later they were told that the sale had been rescinded and they could stay in the house.

Huzzah!

Oh wait — there’s more.

Four days after receiving the good news, a man came to the house with an eviction notice.

When they contacted the bank, the husband says it was BofA asking him if the sale had been rescinded.

“The bank who was supposed to have done it, didn’t know if they did it,” he tells King5. “So they contacted my attorneys to see if they had done it.”

This shrugging went on until this past March, when the same man came back with an all new eviction notice.

A few weeks later, the bank decided that it didn’t actually mean it when it had told the couple the sale had been rescinded.

Proving the old adage of “If at first you don’t succeed, contact your local news station’s consumer reporter,” the couple called King 5. Magically, once the news folks talked to BofA, the eviction was put on hold and the matter was escalated to the office of none other than CEO Brian Moynihan.

In a statement to King5, the bank writes:

Bank of America is confident the 2010 foreclosure was properly conducted. The mortgage was in severe default at the time of the foreclosure. The bank had been unable to qualify [the homeowners] for a modification, based on the financial information available to the bank at the time, leaving no basis to postpone the sale date.

Based upon updated financial information provided after the foreclosure sale, Bank of America began the process of rescinding the foreclosure and reconsidering a modification. It is unclear why the process to rescind the foreclosure did not move forward and Bank of America apologizes to [the homeowners] for the unexplained lapse in completing that process in a timely fashion.

The bank says it will continue to work toward a resolution that will keep the family in its house for as “long as a viable home retention solution may be available.”